By Stephen Dinan -
The Washington Times -
Thursday, September 14, 2017

Weeks after saying there wasn’t enough public interest in Hillary Clinton’s email case, the FBI’s decision has been modified, and the bureau will publicly release more details of its obstruction of justice probe into the former secretary of state.

The Justice Department confirmed the new position in a letter Thursday to Ty Clevenger, a lawyer who’d filed an open records request for the information.

The FBI had initially told him there wasn’t enough public interest to outweigh Mrs. Clinton’s privacy concerns, but he appealed to the Justice Department, which said it was “modifying the FBI’s response.”

Justice Department official Sean R. O’Neill said that after speaking with Mr. Clevenger, they have concluded that the records in question are part of the Clinton email investigation file, which he said they’re already making public in installments.

“Any records concerning the FBI’s investigation of obstruction of justice are currently being processed by the FBI along with the remainder of the Clinton email investigation file. The FBI is publicly posting all releasable records on a rolling basis,” he said.

The records are being posted at the FBI’s “vault,” a section of the bureau’s website, under the heading “Hillary R. Clinton.”

“The FBI will continue to process and post subsequent releases of responsive records until processing of the entire investigative file is complete,” Mr. O’Neill said.

Mr. Clevenger took that to mean the Justice Department had overruled the FBI and reversed its earlier decision.

Earlier this week Mr. Clevenger won a ruling from a state judge in Maryland who overruled the state bar counsel’s office and ordered an investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers should face discipline for their handling of Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Mr. Clevenger says that by deleting emails that the government later determined were official records and should have been returned to the State Department — and that were subject to preservation requests — the lawyers engaged in destruction of evidence.